Dr. Julian Cheng, P. Eng.

Educational Background

PhD -- Electrical Engineering (Alberta)

MSc (Eng) -- Mathematics & Engineering (Queen’s)

BEng -- Electrical Engineering (Victoria)

General Background

Julian Cheng received a B. Eng. Degree (First Class) in electrical engineering from the University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada in 1995, a M.Sc. (Eng.) degree in mathematics and engineering from Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada in 1997, and a PhD degree in electrical engineering from the University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada, in 2003.

In July 2006, He joined the School of Engineering, Faculty of Applied Science, The University of British Columbia (Okanagan campus) as an Assistant Professor. He is now a Full Professor in the same School. Previously, Dr. Cheng worked for Bell Northern Research (BNR) and Northern Telecom (later known as NORTEL Networks), and taught at both University of Alberta and Lakehead University. His current research interests include digital communications over wireless channels, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing, spread spectrum communications, statistical signal processing for wireless applications, and optical wireless communications. Dr. Cheng co-chaired the 12th Canadian Workshop on Information Theory (CWIT 2011), the 6th EAI International Conference on Game Theory for Networks (GameNet 2016), and the 28th Biennial Symposium on Communications (BSC 2016). In 2012, he chaired the 2012 Wireless Communications, which was held July 3-5, 2012 in Banff, Canada. Currently, he serves as an Area Editor for IEEE Transactions on Communications. In the past, he severed as an Editor for IEEE Transactions on Communications, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, IEEE Communications Letters, and IEEE Access. He also served as a Guest Editor for a special issue of IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications on optical wireless communications. Dr. Cheng is also a Senior Member of IEEE.

Dr. Cheng was the recipient of numerous scholarships during his undergraduate and graduate studies, which included a President Scholarship from the University of Victoria and a postgraduate scholarship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). He was also a winner of the 2002 NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship competition.

Dr. Cheng held an Adjunct Professor position with the University of Alberta (2005-2010). He is a registered Professional Engineer in British Columbia. Dr. Cheng was also the founding chair of IEEE Okanagan Subsection. Currently, he is serving as the President for the Canadian Society of Information Theory (CSIT).

Xuegui Song and Julian Cheng, ``Quantifying the Accuracy of High SNR BER Approximation of MPSK and MDPSK in Fading Channels,” Proceedings of the 27th Queen’s Biennial Symposium on Communications (QBSC), Kingston, ON, Canada, June 1-3, 2014.

Ning Wang and Julian Cheng, ``Estimating the Nakagami-m Fading Parameter by the Generalized Method of Moments,” Proceedings of the 2011 International Conference on Communications (ICC), Kyoto, Japan, June 5-9, 2011.

July 17, 2018 Dr. Cheng was invited as a Distinguished Speaker at ComNet' 2019 in Marrakech, Morocco, Apr. 15-18, 2019.

June 6, 2018 Congratulations to Hui Ma for winning the inaugural Canadian Society of Information Theory (CSIT) Annual Paper Award at Biennial Symposium on Communications (BSC) in Toronto, ON, June 6-7, 2018.

May 22, 2018 Dr. Cheng will co-chair the 2020 Communication Theory Workshop (CTW) in Banff, Alberta. This is the first time that this prestigious workshop will be held in Canada.

Apr. 10, 2018 Dr. Cheng was invited to give a talk at Guangzhou International Lighting Exhibition, which is the most influential and comprehensive Lighting and LED event in Asia with estimated 2,400 exhibitors and 50,000-200,000 visitors.

Mar. 21, 2018 Dr. Cheng was invited to co-chair the Optical and Grid Computing Symposium at the International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications (ICNC 2019) Honolulu, Hawaii, USA.

Feb. 15, 2018 In a February paper published in IEEE Transactions on Communications, we reported a new elegant and highly accurate (possibly the best) approximation to the distribution function of lognormal sum, which finds applications in many science and engineering disciplines.

Feb. 1, 2018 Dr. Cheng was appointed to be an Area Editor in ``Communication Theory and Systems I" for IEEE Transactions on Communications (TCOM), which was launched in 1953 and is best known for publishing high quality research results in telecommunications.

Dec. 1, 2017 Our new invention Angle of Difference of Arrival (ADOA) was published in IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC). In this paper, we developed the theory for ADOA and experimentally showed that it is possible to achieve indoor positioning accuracy of less than 5 cm using an LED array and a smart phone camera with arbitrary tilting angles.

July 10, 2017 Dr. Cheng was appointed to be a High-level Visiting Scientist in International Guest Academic Talents (IGAT) Base on Information Network System Architecture and Convergence at Beijing University Posts & Telecommunications (BUPT), which was ranked No. 1 in Telecommunication Engineering by Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) in 2017.

July 2, 2017 Dr. Cheng gave an invited talk on indoor location using visible light at International Conference on Optical Wireless Communications (sponsored by Project 973) in Beijing, China.

June 30, 2017 Dr. Cheng was invited to deliver an optical wireless communication short course at VNIT, Nagpur, India under the Global Initiative of Academic Networks (GIAN) program, Government of India.

June 13, 2017 Dr. Cheng was elected at CWIT 2017 in Quebec City to become the President of Canadian Society of Information Theory (CSIT).

May 29, 2017, Dr. Cheng won the competition of Department of National Defense (DND) and NSERC Discovery Grant Supplement for $40,000 per year for three years. Only 20 such awards were given in this round of national competition.

April 20, 2017 Dr. Cheng successfully renewed his NSERC Discovery Grant for $47,000 per year for five years.

Sept. 23, 2016 Dr. Cheng was invited, among four UBC professors, to attend a welcome banquet for Premier Li Keqiang and his wife Mme. Cheng Hong in Montreal, Canada.

July 16, 2016 Dr. Cheng was interviewed by the Science Section of the New York Times to comment on Facebook's latest light-based wireless communication technology.

June 5, 2016 Dr. Cheng co-chaired the 2018 Biennial Symposium on Communication (BSC) in Kelowna, BC. This is the first time that BSC was held ouside the the Queen's University campus since its inception in 1962.